Sunbelt metros in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Colorado, the Carolinas and Utah are typically the fastest-growing Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) in Electrical Marketing's electrical sales potential data.
But in our latest look at employment data, MSAs in Michigan and Indiana showed the most year-over-year (YOY) growth on a percentage basis in total electrical sales potential, including Elkhart-Goshen, IN; Flint, Lansing-East Lansing, Ann Arbor and Detroit-Warren-Dearborn, MI; and Fargo, ND-MN. The auto industry is a key employer in these markets, and despite the well-documented shortages in computer chips for vehicles, the industry as a whole is on the move, with big-time investment in new facilities for electric vehicles.
EM uses a three-month average of the monthly employment data published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) with Electrical Wholesaling's sales-per-employee multipliers to develop total electrical sales potential estimates for local market areas. When analyzed on this basis for February through April of this year, at the top of the list was the Elkhart-Goshen, IN MSA, with a +22.1% increase, based largely on a +29% increase in industrial employment over the February-April 2020 time period. Elkhart-Goshen, IN area is known as the “RV capital of the world,” because of how many manufacturers of recreational vehicles, as well as van conversion companies and boat manufacturers, have plants there.
Because this time period covered the COVID-19 downtown in employment, be cautious about reading too much into the increase for this and other metros. It's still a solid trend. The The chart on page 2 lists the current 50 largest MSAs for total electrical sales potential, and www.electricalmarketing.com offers a list of the 200 largest MSAs. These MSAs account for an estimated 80% of all electrical product sales sold through electrical distributors. They will be revised when the May data comes in from BLS.
